A Lonely and Twisted World
by Antje
Summary: Glitch and Cain dreamed of their youthful selves while trapped in their lonely and twisted worlds of isolation and insanity. Now that they're freed, can they connect the past dreams to the present? Glitch/Cain
1. Part I

A Lonely and Twisted World  
Summary: Glitch and Wyatt dreamed of their youthful selves while trapped in their lonely and twisted worlds of isolation and insanity. Now that they're freed, can they connect the dreams to the present? Loosely based on themes of Emma Hewitt's song "Foolish Boy."  
Pairing: Glitch/Wyatt  
Length: 5,600 words

-x-

I.

Starting the night he met DG, Glitch again began to dream. They flooded to him. Torrents, impossible to decipher, waggled incessantly behind his eyes, stole his breath, and made him wish for the emptiness that'd plagued him before. He drew patterns in the sand when DG wasn't looking. He turned fronds of ferns upon the dirt to mimic the movements he'd seen in his sleep. Then, one afternoon, when they were on their way to meet the end of the world, he opened up his mouth to speak. "I confess," he said, laughing—he always did laugh now in his speech, "I confess that I blame the nightmares on you."

DG stripped the dreams down for him, analytically, emotionlessly. She was better than her mother in some respects. "It's not me you're really blaming. It's the situation. The stress. I know," and she pressed his arm but began immediately to walk away, "it's just the stress of seeing it all again."

She meant the whole of him he was in his memories. But even to DG, it couldn't be drawn together peacefully—the first Ambrose, the second man born of him. He concluded the difference. Memories strangled, and the strangler was Ambrose. Dreams fascinated, and the mesmerizer was Glitch. He tried to tell DG this, but it was late, and the stars hum and the fir trees sang, and he was captured by his dreams.

It was the first night he dreamed of a boy beneath a moon and a rainbow, someone he hadn't seen before. The image of the youth plagued him all day, romping through marshes, through mist. He thought of the youth and a warmth enveloped him, though the sky came down in silvery streaks, his breath plumed ahead of him, and DG's sympathies mutated into worry.

"I dreamed about a boy," he said for the sake of speaking. She became his ambulatory diary, the pen he never held, the paper he never creased. She listened, absorbing his verbal ink like complacent stationery. She held his hand, and he saw at his fingertips the imagined stains of forgotten fountain pens.

"What kind of boy?" She grew curious because she, since coming to the Other Side, the Far End of Hopes, she hadn't dreamed of prosaic things. If she did, she failed to see them as a cyclic nighttime vision, with plot and thesis and schematics. Her mind was pressed with a series of images. Cosmos, corn, doohickies in a laboratory far removed from her present life, locked in a place in her past—and woke cold, smelling of leaf mold and pine tar, and regarded the bald white mountain peaks as she had in her sleep. She never had the dullness to dream of a boy. "I hope he was nice to you in your sleep." DG raised the side of her mouth, turning away prior to his ability to see anything lewd underneath her stark stare.

"Nice to me?" Glitch fervidly repeated, dumping it out there in a winded, hackled, contentious manner. "I'll have you know, missy, I was really someone important once, and even in my dreams all the boys are nice to me!"

"I'm sure they are." DG pressed his wrist. He bobbed about in her present sweetly, and where would she have gone, and what would she have done, if she hadn't met Glitch? But he was not his own master, not really. He roamed the wilds, encountered situations that were beyond his brain power—and he frustrated himself with the woes of his past. He knew so little of what he was, who he was. He remembered his life in tangles. There could've been a boy once; Glitch was old enough, she judged, to have a child. But there could've been a man once, too; he was old enough to love forever. DG caught that persistent thread. She hoped someone had loved Glitch once. "Was it someone you knew, do you think, in the past?"

"I don't know." The little hill he climbed sucked the vim from him. He paused at the apex, shifting around the tattered cuffs of his coat, every button down the front lost in accordance to the annuals he wore it. "The past is all the same to me, my little catkin. Well, look, we've managed to find more marshland." He winced, his eyelashes extravagant, black down covered in a silvery rainy soot. "I don't recall all this marshland. But I do recall a flood. A massive flood." He turned his snicker into a blowy laugh. "It would have to have been massive for me to remember it, or to call it a flood."

DG steered him away from failures, from forgetfulness. These were nuisances, projectiles that maimed Glitch's wafting self-confidence. She squinted, too, but her black lashes were not so downy, and she'd blinked away the ashen rainwater. "I think I see something up ahead. Looks like—like it might be a cabin."

"These are the western plains," Glitch responded, conjuring from his inner soul a long-lost map rolled upon a table of iron and marble, surrounded by windows and light, perfumed by books and gardens. What was that place? It scraped against his conscious like the youth he barely knew. "This is where the rebellion started, where—" he paused to capture a hint of it, "where the Sorceress sent the Long Coats first. The first blood was shed here."

He lifted his holed shoe. DG watched the gratuitous demonstration, concerned but disassociated with his palavering of war, Long Coats and this sad business of a mad Sorceress. What he found at the end of his sole was nothing but grit from trees, sludge and flecks of duckweed.

"No blood." The tip of his toe returned to soggy earth. He itched a spot in his hair. The zipper nagged, distracted—itched and screamed and scared him. "I expected the blood would stay. There might be bodies in that cabin. You never know."

"It could be the boy from your dreams, too." She looked back at him. He was hesitant to go. He was thinking of blood, and she was thinking of different wars. Did they want the same things? He wanted what he wanted: to find where he belonged, to remember who he was. She wanted to find her parents, wanted to go home. Yet as she stepped ahead, her eyes met mountains caught in a fine web of clouds, and she wondered if her home was where she had left it, or if it was nowhere especially wonderful now.

"DG," he hailed her, but no princess of a fairy tale ever lingered when momentum shoved her ahead. She was far ahead. He sighed, trembling. Why did everyone have to move so far ahead? He fidgeted with the broken cuffs again, unraveled a thread, tugged until it snapped, and espied the cabin of the dead. It was easy for DG to go ahead. She was a kid, really. No past, only the future. What he longed to embrace was the past. He was stuck in an antiquated world, one that would be penned in books of O.Z. history.

He rambled along the least soggy path. He slapped bugs that nibbled meanly at his neck. "Who _lives _in this gods-forsaken place, anyway?" But in his wakeful midnight state, he'd seen the gargantuan being of the sky, felt its cold caress. A thousand miles from nothing, from no one, but he would be happy having the stars for his neighbors. He raised his head then, still walking, and tried to find a star, a planet, a hint of the midnight he'd seen. There were raindrops in his eyes, and limbs of a pine copse overcame his vestiges of one lost night.

He and DG bumped. She was peering round a bole. He looked with her across the draggled land, up to a cabin, up to a metal box somehow in the shape of a man.

"No, wait, DG! Shouldn't we talk about this?" But whenever he called for her to stop, DG, obstinately ran ahead.

What kind of man was in the box of whirls and wheezes, the box that had the outline of a concrete man? It could be a lunatic. A murderer. He whispered to himself. "Could be a headcase like me. For DG's sake, I hope it isn't. I can barely handle one of me!"


	2. Part II

II.

DG was well on her way. Glitch watched her ride down the palace lane on her strawberry roan. Her hair was lusciously licorice, combed and curled at the ends, and a big-brimmed hat protected fair skin from the power of two summery suns. A mother and a sister went with her.

"No Ahamo this trip?"

Glitch gave a little jump. Wyatt poked him in the shoulder.

"I scared you," said Wyatt, smiling to a show a pleasure at winning one old bet. "Admit it. I scared you."

"Are you kidding? You're about as quiet as Mount Shalusta when she's about to blow. You rumble, stomp, and breathe so loud I'm surprised you ever—ever—"

Wyatt tapped him, kindly this time, absent of the malice and annoyance he'd once displayed.

"I'm not glitching," came the retaliation. He shrugged, returning to the urban vista, the cove of gardens behind castle walls, the high tops of buildings that'd once been falling down. "I merely forgot what I was going to say. But you didn't scare me. And no, no there is no Ahamo on this trip."

Wyatt remained, not the least interested in the faraway specks of the royal coterie, only interested in another pilgrimage. "Are you packed?"

"Of course I'm packed."

They hadn't known one another longer than six months, yet Wyatt had been inflicted, from the start, with a special understanding of Glitch. It was as though the encapsulating suit had programmed him. He knew all the gaps in Glitch, all the missed moments of logic, all the jokes no one ever laughed at Wyatt laughed at, and all the nightmares, all the dreams, the symbols of stars and clocks and sky. Wyatt interpreted everything of him.

"No, I mean, are you _really _packed. Packed more than a few clean hankies and a change of undies—that kind of packed."

Glitch's inner temperature rose by small degrees. Wyatt was an inferno who treated him infernally. "Oh—you mean _that _kind of packed. Well, since Raw's coming, I guess I'd better pack clothes."

"Most imperative," Wyatt remarked, letting Glitch head down the stony corridor, lined with plants in giant vases, landscapes painted by long-dead royals, windows that looked to courtyards and gardens and possessed the best of Central City views. "You'll be riding a horse, so clothes are a must."

"But _not_ a must _not_."

Wyatt let that one go. It was better if Glitch gave the last word. Wyatt remained uncertain of the ebb and flow of their flirtatious rivalry. Wyatt grumbled to himself. "Should've asked the Queen for use of a car, after all." If just to see if Glitch would consider clothes optional attire for a vacation in the O.Z. southern hills.

They were required by imposition of their court life, by the mellowness and idleness of their lives since the Not Quite the End of the World moment they'd known, to return to his habitat one homesick viewer. Raw did not want to return to clan to ask for peace, but decided, after hours upon hours of meditation, that he would return to his mother's clan. Raw could read the hearts of others, understood the energies of the planet—but he couldn't read a map to save his life.

"He gets lost going from the kitchen to the bathroom to his bedroom," Glitch said as he and Wyatt rode close to one another on the Old Road. "Seriously, I've never seen someone with that awful of a sense of direction. I didn't say that sentence very well, but, you're not a pedant ass, and I don't care to try and play philologist. Maybe if I'd said 'someone who has such a terrible sense of direction', but, see, that sounds really bland, and I liked my—"

"I know you didn't want to come on this trip, Glitch."

He peeled his gaze from the flowering shrubberies and rested them on Cain. Even with the hat in place, the brim low on his brow, he still squinted as the sunbeams of evening hit his face. Glitch was in the shrubs' shadow, but his thoughts rushed into the light.

"I don't think we should talk about this. I'll gallop ahead if you do."

"On this stretch of road, with these thorny, these—" Wyatt swiped a gloved hand against them. "Whatever the hell they are."

"Roses," Raw purred from the front. The dappled backside of his horse waddled up and down, and as he and the horse skidded in and out of daylight, it was difficult to tell where the fur of the viewer's clothes left off and the tail of the horse began. "Magician's roses," he continued, his speech like the lowing of a cow—soft, rumbly, with the melancholy of generations behind it. "They are harvested to make wine, and dried for teas. They have thorns." He raised a didactic finger. "Don't touch!"

"Why?" Glitch hitched forward eagerly in the saddle. Wyatt tried to paw him to a position resembling stability. A flailed arm put a stop to his intentions. "What happens? Does it suck out all your blood? Oh, vampiric rose thorns! Seems I recall hearing something about a rose thorn that sucked the life out of someone once. Probably a princess. Boy, I tell you what, I'm sure glad _I _wasn't born a princess," he snorted his way out of a snicker, "because, wow, do they get into a lot of trouble! So, what is it, Raw? About the roses? I mean the thorns. Right? Wasn't I talking about the thorns? What is _wrong _with you, Cain? I'm in the saddle." He bounced in the saddle three times, winced at the soreness it brought upon him. "I'm fine. A little achier now with the demonstration of my sturdiness, but fine."

"I just don't want you to get too eager and fall off."

"Have I ever fallen out of the saddle?" Glitch suddenly remembered that they hadn't known one another their whole lives, that there were flagrant gaps, enormous and untouchable decades, with the emptiness of his life before Wyatt.

"You've never fallen out of a saddle," Wyatt decided to say, shaking his head minimally, smiling just as minimally.

"Thank you, that's all I wanted to hear. 'You've never fallen out of a saddle.'"

"But you've fallen out of bed plenty of times."

On the back of his dappled horse, Raw startled Wyatt and Glitch with a laugh. He had never laughed so loudly, so emotionally, in front of them.

"Hard to say what it resembles," Glitch spoke conspiratorially to Wyatt. "Like a tree falling in the woods."

"If no one's around to hear it, does a viewer really laugh?"

The end of his nose was touched gently with his finger. "You got it. Sometimes I wonder if you don't have the other half of my brain."

"Sometimes I wonder that myself."

"So what about it, Raw, what do the thorns do if I prick myself?"

A fine horseman, able to maneuver in the saddle as well as he contorted his body into shapes and angles that made Wyatt and Glitch cross their legs and cringe, Raw observed Glitch, then Cain, and back to Glitch. He barked another one of his somber laughs. C-flat, Glitch thought it was—the sound of a minor cord.

"The thorns prick you," said the succinct viewer, "and you bleed, stop moving, dismount, waste time bandaging you."

"He has a point," interposed Wyatt, having glimpse Glitch's expression of bewilderment and hurt. "Cheer up, Glitch."

"That's amusing, coming from you. You're as cheery as a funeral pyre."

"We still have the return trip to look forward to."

"I am not talking to you right now."

"All right. If you feel that way. I'll be silent. I got used to being silent. I didn't talk for, you know, _years_."

"Yes, I remember. We _all _know your story, Cain. Now quit talking to me. Please. I'm hungry, humorless, and my testicles are very sore. Did I say that out loud? Sorry. I really must learn to—to—" he made a gesture of spewing nonsense with his hand in front of his mouth, "I really must learn to filter this bitch."

"I thought you weren't talking."

"I'm not!"

"Then stop talking."

"I am! _You_ stop talking!"

Wyatt waited, certain that in seven seconds Glitch would again flit words into the air. He counted the seconds away in his head.

"I'm going to read a little while I ride. Don't talk to me. I mean it. Both of you. I'm very busy," his fingers twiddled next to his ear, indicating the messy place within, "very busy in here."

Glitch fiddled with the pocket of his newest of new coats. He bought a coat now every fifth week—or he had, until Wyatt said it was nonsensical, that he was pushing the limits of his allowance and salary too far, that he was being selfish and extravagant. The coat was seven weeks old, and now he had money leftover to indulge in the reading he'd left behind before his renegade days. From the pocket he brought forth a tiny anthology of O.Z. poetry, and regaled Wyatt and Raw with stanzas that stole his heart. He read until the orange light of the summer suns melded with the cold blue of night's horizon.

By firelight—Cain's exemplary leader skills fully on display—Glitch attempted to read the remaining five poems. His back was padded with his bedroll against the length of a tree, nestled among its roots, some pine ivy that grew wild there, some moss that pillowed and scented. Raw and Wyatt insisted on conversing. Glitch set his book to his chest, watching his friends in the dance of unpredictable sprints of flame. The two men spoke congenially of home, the palace, telling tales and reliving memories of hilarity. Glitch had trouble joining in these triumphs of memory. What he remembered and what they remembered were shapes and images incongruent. Yet the sibilants and intonations of Raw and Wyatt left Glitch content, sleepy. He dozed—and amid the forest perfumed by pine, with Wyatt's laughter in the background of his thoughts, Glitch dreamed about the lost youth.

He woke in the dark, a hand touching his. "Supper's ready," Wyatt said. "You wouldn't like me much if I made you sleep through supper. Raw would eat it in his sleep. You know he would."

Raw heard this, contributing no denial, no acceptance. He enjoyed the strict timber of Wyatt's voice, that, when the former tin man spoke a dozen words at once, it was to the face of Glitch.

Glitch shimmied his hand free from Wyatt's, slipped to his side, away from firelight and food. He didn't want to think—not of food, not of this journey with Wyatt across three states, not of the boy in the dream he'd begun to understand. He wished for DG, her confidence, her unspoiled soul, the one who let him unburden his spirit though she was too young to understand. Glitch winced, feeling the presence leave him, and called for it to stay.

"Cain?"

"Yeah?"

"Maybe just a cookie for me tonight."


	3. Part III

III.

In a place whose undulating hills of deep emerald were visions of his past and future, Raw could relinquish the grip he had on unchangeable moments. He'd held to them as a leash. It was important to remember. Glitch heard Raw speak of this, not exactly in words that narrators use, but in a way that was Raw-like, painted in the selflessness of him. Glitch heard Raw speak of it and snorted his derision. "If I could remember half the things I forgot, I would consider myself fortunate. You remember everything, Raw, and now I know what a curse and burden memories are." But when it came time for the trio of men to separate, Glitch kept his distance. He stood with the horses, watching Cain and Raw from a perch beneath a shading magnolia.

"Magnolias, around at a time when the pollination of beetles was the way to go," he told the horses, petted one warm, dirty horse nose. "Can you imagine being around so long ago that bees weren't here, and beetles were pollinating every flower? Boggles the mind kinda, doesn't it?"

Wyatt could hear Glitch yapping in the background, trying, with every controllable aspect of him, to remain focused upon Raw's parting words. It was too impossible to save the world alongside a man and not see the treasures within him. Even with Glitch, Wyatt had found, had witnessed, those respectable gems. Of Raw, Wyatt expected sanguine adages, prophetic visions, or at least a handshake and a teary goodbye. But Wyatt flinched as Raw grabbed him by the chin. He waited, watching the viewer's eyes slip to a close. The warmth of the hand along his jaw increased. Wyatt wondered what Raw was reading, and what would be the aftermath of this spontaneity.

In a moment, Raw's hand slipped away, the lids of his eyes drew up. "Thank you for bringing me. I am not the only one returning to his past."

Cain had never heard Raw speak so plainly, so coherently. Of the three of them, Glitch and him and Raw, Wyatt always thought of himself, selectively and quietly, as "the sane one." And even that evaluation of his mentality was stretched to the length of sheer impossibility. With the dreams he had at night, with the dreams he had during the day, he questioned his sanity.

Raw waved a hand at faraway Glitch. Their farewells had already passed. Wyatt stayed until Raw vanished from sight, out of the woods and into the farmland surrounding the new community that would welcome him. Wyatt sighed, angling from what he couldn't see. It was like Raw to find his place. DG had. So had the Sorceress. There was no place for him, and no place for Glitch.

"Come on," Wyatt slapped his hand against the back of Glitch's neck, squeezed, "let's get going. You don't mind if we don't head back the way we came, do you?"

Glitch couldn't grasp the question in the sentence. "Too many words, Wyatt. Too many dos and don'ts and I couldn't—" He broke it off. He smiled instead. "Try again?"

Wyatt didn't mind this rephrasing of what he'd said. He'd grown used to it. Glitch hadn't. Unprecedentedly, Wyatt found them walking close together, holding the horses' leads. He reached for Glitch's hand, finding it empty, feathery, as if full of the threads off the cuff of his old holed coat. Wyatt raised their joined hands, examining their fingers, finding no threads, no feathers—just the impression that they'd left.

"We're going to take another way home."

Glitch didn't mind, but he minded the ambiguity of it. "What home?" he asked, expecting no answer, but a set of lips grazed the back of his hand.


	4. Part IV

IV.

Glitch wasn't expecting to race back to the palace via the Nameless Pluvial Plain—also known as the Marshlands of Fairdane.

He stood at the top of a little knoll in a copse of pine, with the hissing of mosquitos and the scent something dreadful, like vinegar and brine. Wyatt swerved around him, commanding in his billowing cerecloth coat to keep out the rain. Glitch reached for Wyatt's wrist, too late, and missed.

"No, Cain, wait!"

And with those words he was back speaking to DG, back on the knoll in a pine copse, with the bloody cabin and the man of hollow iron ahead.

He blinked, twitching, resetting himself, praying that when he opened his eyes this was a lie. He prayed for time to fold back upon itself. Before he opened his eyes, time stood still, with breath against his skin and a rough thumb against his mouth. Glitch leaned in, hoping the dream wouldn't lead him astray, wanting to find Cain's lips at the end of his search.

"This is my past, Glitch," Wyatt said, picking at Glitch's mouth, waiting for Glitch to look at him. It was already a better moment than the last he'd spent there, with sour memories, the death of a wife unforgotten, the incogitable truth spilled by a headcase about the madness of an unknown enemy—a sorceress, the old princess.

Glitch was summoned by Wyatt to open his eyes, make time move forward, though in an instant it could stop again. Why did Wyatt like him, and why were they there, standing juxtaposed between history and future? But he blinked and set their palms together. "What do you remember when you were in the suit?"

"Life as I'd known it," murmured Wyatt, drawing fingers freely down the length of Glitch's chin. "I had memories and history—and a picture."

Glitch stuttered, inched forward in a step rebelling against the probability of what he couldn't delineate. It was within his grasp—answers—realities—recognition. "Did you have dreams?"

"Dreams?" Wyatt smiled into the word, dancing his eyes between Glitch's. "I never noticed it before, but your irises, they're not really brown, are they? They're like granite, polished, reflective, full of a hundred shades, and I can see myself in them. I brought you here to help me forget."

"Why should you forget? If I could do anything in the world, anything under the suns—if I could ask the gods for just one wish over the rest of my life, I would—I would—" He glanced at Wyatt earnestly, forgetfully. "No—no I wouldn't wish to remember everything, to never forget. I couldn't wish that now that I understand what it's like to want to forget something that happened, the terrible things that the heart is supposed to sieve when it gets around to it. I would forget for you. I'd forget the pain of your exile for you—if I could."

If Wyatt didn't kiss Glitch then, he was sure he never would. He claimed hold of Glitch's face—his hands were hot against Glitch's rain-touched and cool cheeks—and he let them breathe the same air for a moment, to have a chance to remember it. He tested Glitch's willingness with a tiny touch of lips, like they were forbidden to be together—but Glitch clutched him by the waist and drew him in. Wyatt thought the sensations would be old-fashioned, curdling him with guilt—and he endured an ache in his chest, a signal that the hidden hurts had been found, destroyed and let go. Glitch found a switch to the interminable portion of his soul. Behind his eyes, sketched in his heart, pictures of his dreams, the beautiful youth who'd befriended him, who'd been his ghostly lover, a memory sent to comfort rather than destroy like so many of his memories did. He wrapped his tongue freely around Wyatt's, wrapped his arms tightly at Wyatt's neck, breathing deeply, exploring fully, and trying to place the taste of Wyatt to a flavor he'd known before. He drew in sharply, struggling, inhaling wrong. He confused Wyatt.

"Are you all right?"

"You—you—I've—" Glitch smeared Wyatt's spit across his lips, against a welt where Wyatt had drawn back with a bump of teeth against skin. "You taste like melted snow—like the sorrows of a winter day. But you taste like melted snow."

"I thought you tasted like waterfalls," countered Wyatt, a new tenderness in his smile.

"Wyatt, what were you dreams when you were in the suit? What world did you know?"

"A lonely one," Wyatt remarked, now comfortable beside Glitch, holding him, knowing him. He saw the past as a sphere of blackness. He could escape it now, look back upon it from a high pinnacle. He was safe, even as he glanced at what remained of his prison. "What did I dream? I don't know. When I exhausted the dreams of Adora and Jeb, I-I seemed to invent dreams." He kicked at a broken piece of the suit, rusted from the endless Fairdane rain. The heel of his boot spun on mud and grass. He faced Glitch, less in the copse now, enduring the prickles of tiny drops. "I invented someone, I think. A boy. Not—not a boy—a teenager. Thirteen, fourteen?"

Glitch's inhalation was shaky, his expression quibbling between fright and astonishment. He didn't know what to feel. "What—what did you two do?"

"What do boys do?"

Glitch's salacious nature returned in a twinkling. He shrugged, smirked. "Well, honey, that depends entirely on the boys." He let Wyatt catch his hands, hold them together. He let a kiss hit his damp forehead. He tasted like waterfalls? He felt like a waterfall. Unstoppable, immortal. Waterfalls just go on and on. They have nothing to remember, and they have nothing to forget. "Wyatt?"

"You want to get out of the rain?"

"Well—yes, I do—but I-I—I used to have dreams, too. Lost in my lonely and twisted world, wandering, roving, whatever you'd like to call it. I dreamed about a boy. Thirteen. Fourteen. Blond. Fair. Eyes crisply blue, like ice, like the eyes of northern wolves. He was my greatest friend, my comfort in an uncontrollable place."

Wyatt, having nothing to say, for once as mute as he'd been while molded in tin, slipped his hand across Glitch's shoulder. The fingers were glazed, pressed, but Glitch wouldn't look at him yet. Wyatt stood close, holding both Glitch's shoulders, sighing faintly into his hair.

"You think it was a form of magic?"

"That what? Allows all headcases to dream of all men locked in iron purgatory? No. Do you think I'll ever know the answer? No. I won't know the answer. Neither will you." His trembling quieted the moment Wyatt held his face again, the way he had to kiss him.

"And not knowing the answer won't drive you mad, right?"

"Promise it won't." Glitch used a forefinger to etch an invisible "X" over his heart, raised his hand, then set it into the warm haven under Wyatt's coat. "Can we forget the transcendental nonsense of our realm's romantic magic, and get into the cabin?"

"Let's be sensible," Wyatt paused, cupping Glitch's chin—a tempting chin, "and get the horses in the lean-to first—then we can get into the cabin."

"Then we can go home?"

"If you can find the way, I'll go with you."

"I can find our way. But even if I can't, come with me anyway."


	5. Part V

V.

DG was sure her mother and Glitch were going to talk of a subject they wished she wouldn't overhear. Glitch, resplendent in his new suit, kissed the little princess at her temple. "Go and talk to Wyatt, would you? It's his wedding and he's already bored." DG trilled a sparrow's laugh, patted Glitch's fluffy, lacy cravat, and wended her way between Glitch and her mother. She would let them speak as adults, and she would pretend not to mind.

"What do you think Glitch wanted to say to Mother?"

Throughout the day, Wyatt's smile was never-ending. The ghosts of his past had been replaced with the realness of Glitch.

"I used to have dreams," Glitch told the embodiment of royalty, finery, the lovely friend he'd once had. "I used to dream about a young man. He wasn't tangible. He was a dream. What are they made of? Gossamer fairy wings. But I met him in this life as a man. He used to have dreams, too. He dreamed about a young man. Somehow, and I don't know how," but Glitch tried staring into those lavender eyes, trying to find a blockade, a response, something she couldn't hide behind, "we dreamed about each other trapped in our twisted worlds, stuck there, living the past on repeat—him with his wife's death, me—me—well—everything with me is on repeat. I studied science, but I never studied much magic. I promised Wyatt I would never find an answer to why we dreamed. Is there an answer? I'm not so sure there is. Magic is supernatural, paranormal: it defies exploratory science, as it's supposed to, as it will continue to do. That's all I came to say."

"Ambrose."

He stopped because she'd summoned him to, not because she'd called him by the proper name. He anticipated a coy remark, a shuffle of congratulations.

"Congratulations. I know the two of you will spend your lifetime being—being happy with one another, and not afraid of the future any more than you're now afraid of the past."

"Thank you," he murmured, longing to escape this entanglement of royalty, the shimmer of gowns and the tightness of cravats.

But as she walked by to force Ahamo into a dance, Glitch caught the sly tilting of her head, the merest, smallest, wimpiest little grin lifting the far corner of her gentle mouth into a recognizable quirky wrinkle, a tiny incurvation of a dimple.

He wondered if it was possible for a queen to shower upon loving souls a dream. He wondered if it was possible for a queen to string along the lighted threads of souls and twist them together, all while she lived in captivity, under the strangulation of her daughter the sorceress. He wondered if a queen had drawn him and Wyatt together by the simulation of youth in their sleep.

He wondered.

But he shook his head, laughing at himself.

"Nah."


End file.
